Shostakovich Led With a Surer Hand / Wigglesworth delivers with S.F. Symphony

Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, October 21, 2000

A hugely unscientific survey suggests that conductor Mark Wigglesworth's performances of Shostakovich's symphonies are growing more assured and persuasive with time.

To be frank, the study includes only two San Francisco Symphony performances, which puts it at the anecdotal level. One was Wigglesworth's ambitious but unsteady debut performance of the "Leningrad" Symphony in 1996, the other Thursday night's powerfully cohesive rendition of the Tenth Symphony.

The young Englishman, principal guest conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a vigorous, commanding figure, with a sharp, sweeping baton technique and no shilly-shallying about interpretive goals. He brought clarity, focus and expressive bite not only to the Haydn and Britten works that occupied the first half, but to Shostakovich's dark score as well.

And the Tenth Symphony requires nothing less. It was composed immediately after Stalin's death in 1953, but even without reading the symphony as a coded depiction of the late dictator, there is no mistaking the majestic, heartsick gloom of most of the score.

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The vast first movement is the core of the symphony, and this is where Wigglesworth and the orchestra had their finest success. In the long, apprehensive opening section for the strings and in the various solo turns for the woodwind players, the Symphony musicians shone to the utmost, and Wigglesworth shepherded the performance unerringly through its extended twists and turns.

The ferocious, chillingly brief scherzo that follows brought out the orchestra's most unbridled playing, and the intricate third movement -- spearheaded by the vibrant, moody horn calls of associate principal Robert Ward -- made in impressively coherent whole.

The symphony's notable non sequitur is the finale, a burst of Haydnesque high spirits that arrives out of nowhere. Perhaps in an attempt to integrate it into the rest of the work, Wigglesworth lent this music a steely, dour cast; probably a freer reading, even at the risk of emotional illogic, would have wrapped things up more convincingly.

The first half of the concert, though, was superb. Wigglesworth led the first Symphony performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 74 in E-Flat, in a rambunctious, elegantly dry reading. And the "Four Sea Interludes" from Britten's "Peter Grimes" created a magnificent soundscape, especially in the yearning two-note phrases of the "Moonlight" interlude.

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